A high school sports team requires a variety of components, which include soccer balls, volleyballs, nets and referees. The one thing that all of these components have in common is their need for money. Say all you want about coaches, players and the effort that is needed to be successful, but without proper funding that effort is meaningless. Dreyfoos generates the least amount of sports funds in Palm Beach County. This is due to the lack of ticket sales, since we do not have a football team to bring in a profit and basketball is the only sport, charging for admittance this year. Without the proper funding to provide equipment for the players, maintain the courts and fields that are being played on, finance the bus trips to away games and pay the referees for home games, our athletic program is put at a serious disadvantage. It’s as if we’re in a broken down 2000 Nissan Maxima racing in the Daytona 500.

“If we wanted to replace the [volleyball] net, probably $400 or $500 [would be the cost],” girls volleyball coach and science teacher William Wood said. “Brand new [volleyballs] would probably be about $250 [or] $300.”

Rival high schools such as Boca Raton Community High School have been able to establish successful athletic programs through their ability to continually provide the necessary funds that all of the athletic teams need to succeed. They get these funds through their largely successful ticket sales, especially from the football team. With only the boys basketball team selling tickets this year to earn a profit, Dreyfoos athletics are at a series stage of deprivation when it comes to funding.

“The big difference between [Dreyfoos] and other schools is ticket sales,” athletic director and math teacher Christopher Burns said. “Each [basketball] game costs $100 to run just to pay the referees or more.”

The athletic program does get a $10,000 grant every year from the school district if the school is considered to have reasonable gender equity. The difference is that other high schools bring in a majority of their profit from ticket sales from their football team. According to The Palm Beach Post, Boca High’s football team brought in $24,122, Palm Beach Central High brought in $35,915 and Park Vista High brought in $35,004 last year from ticket sales alone.

“They use that money to hire additional coaches to buy specialized equipment,” Mr. Burns said. “We don’t have that money [so] we don’t buy those things.”

Dreyfoos’ inability to buy this equipment and hire additional coaches distorts the “level playing field” of high school sports, and leaves our athletics fighting an artilleries war with box cutters. The only upside to our depleted funding is that the athletic department doesn’t have to fund as much because of the lack of a football team.

“[Other schools] have more income but have a lot more expenses [due to their football teams],” Mr. Burns said.